This post was created in partnership with Nativo
Key takeaways
- Brands are focusing on incrementality to measure what drives impact in a fragmented funnel.
- Creativity is expanding beyond ads to include user-generated content, creators, and AI-led storytelling.
- Marketers want faster, clearer reporting and specialized partners over one-size-fits-all agency solutions.
With an increasing number of marketing and advertising channels, measuring marketing success can be difficult. Brands today are not only experimenting with different types of content and ad formats but also evolving creative efforts through personalization, AI, and creator partnerships. Pinpointing which efforts drive purchasing, while also building loyalty, takes time and is an imprecise science.
During an ADWEEK House Cannes Group Chat co-hosted with Nativo, industry leaders discussed how brands are experimenting with emotionally resonant ads while also striving to boost conversions and track performance.
(L-R) United Airlines’s Julia Fedor, Mars Wrigley’s Rankin Carroll, Danone’s Eric FlinnThe murky middle
Justin Choi, founder and CEO of Nativo, began by sharing the problem their platform is trying to solve: the marketing funnel’s murky middle. Choi defined the murky middle as when “the customer goes through, learns about things, consumes content, and you lose them—and then they show up again later.”
Brands can rely on learnings from the murky middle to better automate and scale programmatic advertising, providing a full customer view and credit for which ads are more impactful, engaging, and attention-getting.
Part of this process involves focusing on incrementality, or the additional lift a specific marketing effort brings. With consumers shopping across countless digital touchpoints, “you’ve got to track people on six different locations where they could buy your product or service,” shared Tim Vanderhook, cofounder and CEO of Viant. The ability to reach consumers in multiple places throughout the day is easy. “The challenge is lining all these metrics up, so it makes logical sense,” he added.
Incrementality is important to hotel and airline brands, said Mandy Gill, VP of marketing for Marriott, since an unused room—or unused airplane seat—is a lost revenue opportunity. “The supply and demand chain challenges are so real that we’re testing everything with incrementality,” she explained. It’s vital to pick the right partners and platforms to measure that impact.